CEMETERY ROAD
by Greg Iles (HarperCollins, $29)
Reviewed by Helen Van Berkel
The struggling Mississippi town of Bienville is excited about the arrival of a planned billion-dollar Chinese paper mill that will bring an economic miracle through new roads, jobs and infrastructure. Especially pleased is the town's Poker Club, an old, white, male cabal who make sure they get more than their share of whatever is going on in the town.
But then archaeologist Buck Ferris, who may or may not have found ancient Indian artefacts and bones on the factory site, is found dead in the river with his head stoved in. Meanwhile, Marshall McEwan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is home from his high-flying Washington job to wait for his estranged alcoholic father to die.
As he continues to work on the local newspaper his father founded, there's no love lost between father and son. Indeed the dying man had not even met his grandson, who tragically drowned at the age of 2. Marshall is having an affair with his old high school girlfriend – now married to his best friend - in one of those claustrophobic small town love stories that seem so inevitable in novels.
I really tried with Cemetery Road. I really, really did. But there was so much detailed backstory and it was so convoluted and overwritten and so detailed that my attention wandered each time. Page after page went by before we returned to Buck Ferris' murder and events in the town. It meant I kind of forgot that that was what we were here for.
I tried to get back into it but I found the pages and pages of detail about Marshall's teenage exploits and love affairs and tragedies to be distracting when all I wanted to know was what happened to Buck?
The link between the past and the present is a feature of Iles' work. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Here, it doesn't. Every now and again the narrative seemed to pick up and I felt borne along on a flood on information that started to point towards a novel that could well uncover layers of small-town intrigue. But then it seemed to veer off into detail about past events and I really didn't need the pages and pages of details. Again.
So, yes, I gave up halfway through. I didn't get to find out who killed whom and although I did take a sneak peek at the back pages to see if there was a nice, simple one-pararagraph explanation of what happened and who did it (there wasn't) there did appear to be a few character-arc resolutions and maybe a few twists.
Greg Iles is a prolific and much-loved writer but it all became too much and although I did try to summon up the determination I simply couldn't finish it. Reading loses its allure when it becomes a chore.